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Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved?

Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills, something I suspect is just lack of exposure to enough peer social interaction to learn how to get good at them. To be fair this is a pretty small sample to draw conclusions from.

I suppose there could also be a pretty strong selection bias at play where the only kids homeschooled in the current environment either have pre-existing issues or messed up family dynamics.

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> Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills

I’ve heard this narrative before but have yet to see it in real life. All the homeschooled kids I’ve met were years ahead of their peers in every respect, especially in social development. They carry themselves like adults and interact with adults as a peer at 16 or even younger.

I suspect those who homeschool because they think their family and community has something much better to offer than the standard fare often do.

Healthy families beget healthy children, regardless of schooling option chosen. I’d argue that unhealthy/unstable families are the ones whose kids would benefit from being educated outside the home.

Homeschooled mid-life adult here (graduated high school in 2001)

Socialization is an issue because, depending on the size of the community you interacted with and how integrated your parents let you be with the rest of America, many of us who were more sheltered are literally from a different culture that people who live in the same country. I have worked long and hard to be able to socialize with people from ‘Regular’ America, and I still, nearly 20 years after I graduated high school, and more easily socialize with people from a Midwestern conservative homeschooled background.

I sometimes tell people I grew up the in the same geography as you, but not the same place.

> I have worked long and hard to be able to socialize with people from ‘Regular’ America, and I still, nearly 20 years after I graduated high school, and more easily socialize with people from a Midwestern conservative homeschooled background.

You're not missing anything.

Maybe it would help us all if coastal elites were able to socialize with people from "regular" America though.

There is no "regular America". It's a big diverse country. We only think that "coastal elites" aren't part of "real America" because the effect of the Electoral College in the 2016 election is fresh in our minds. Change a few historical decisions about state lines and we'd be talking about how the election of Hillary Clinton proves that middle America is out of touch with real Americans from California and New York.

I tend to think it's a good thing when people from one part of the US are able to socialize with other people in different situations. Insularity is a lot of the reason we're in the mess we're in today.

This. I think acting like an adult is construed by other children as a lack of social skills, when it is actually great preparation for the 80-90% of their lives when they won't be children anymore. As adults, we remember all the "weird" homeschooled kids we knew as kids. But look around your office and see if you can identify someone as homeschooled (as opposed to any other, regular old kind of weird).

We're in the very early stages of homeschooling our kids and all we've noticed is that kids on the playground who go to school are surprisingly mean (obviously not most of them, but on average). Thanks to the internet, our kids aren't missing out on pop culture, but they're also not taking their social cues from the coolest 7 year old. Seems like a win-win.

Not sure I agree.

The kids I knew weren’t “acting like adults” in college - they were off.

Didn’t know how to hold a conversation, they were uncomfortable, and had a hard time with social cues and basic listening/including people in conversation.

If I had to speculate I’d guess they had a harder time modeling other people’s mental states along with just generally knowing less what to do - which I think comes from having less peer social exposure to learn from. This creates a feedback loop of social anxiety which can be limiting.

Part of the reason it may be hard to distinguish homeschooled people in the workplace is because they’re largely not there.

It’s hard enough to develop comfortable social skills even with siblings and a lot of exposure. I’d be worried that removing your kids from an environment where they’d get a lot of exposure makes this even harder for them in the long run.

Anecdote for anecdote, all of the homeschoolers I knew when I was younger (N of about 5 or 6) who I thought were fatally weird turned into perfectly normal adults and I'm ashamed to have been so judgmental.

As for homeschooled people in the workplace, my hunch is that there are more than you think there are, and you don't notice because they look like regular adults, but I have no proof! I happen to know a few professionals who were homeschooled, but I never would have known without having had a conversation about our kids and mentioning homeschooling.

That's cool - I'd hope that's generally the case. This could also be more evidence that it is an exposure issue and it takes longer for them to catch up.

I'd be curious to ask adults that were homeschooled if they would want to do the same for their kids.

I'd wonder even if it's the common case they end up perfectly normal adults if it's hard for them prior to that.

I think I'd be nervous about being able to do it effectively for my own kids (both for the social and academic reasons).

That doesn't mean I don't think it's a solvable problem and there is probably a way to create a community of people to do this well, but that might just end up looking like a secular private school.

Don’t have immediate plans to homeschool our children (4 and less than a year). We have found that the 4 year old does much better with outside authority than with us, plus he is a highly social creature who will benefit from the relationships at school, we think. He has done great at preschool, although no plan survives contact with the battlefield. Plus, my wife, while an educator, has no real desire to homeschool, and my career is the more lucrative one so I am likely to be the primary wage earner for now. We are open to homeschool if circumstances seem to dictate it.

Anecdote of 1. I have many friends who were homeschooled who homeschool their kids, and many who refuse to.

Also anecdotal but I was the first child of young parents with no siblings, cousins, or children of parents' friends around for a lot of my life. When other kids did come along in our social circle they were much younger so I spent a lot of time socializing with the adults instead. I had to consciously context-switch my behavior to a huuuuuuge degree whenever I spent time with my friends at school and such because acting the way I did in a lot of my life outside school just didn't work. Nobody would have understood how to relate to me. I've always been very social and never had any anxiety around it but I still had to put in some work to act normally around other kids/teenagers after spending so much time with adults. And I went to a normal public school and did a zillion activities with other kids!

> I’ve heard this narrative before but have yet to see it in real life. All the homeschooled kids I’ve met were years ahead of their peers in every respect, especially in social development. They carry themselves like adults

I don't think you're contradicting fossuser's narrative. Being correctly socialized (evaluated as an adult) is being maladjusted (evaluated as a student). By this theory, homeschooled kids are well equipped to interact with the world, but unsuited to interact with college students.

I was homeschooled until sophomore year of high school. While there were certainly some benefits and I don't totally resent my upbringing, I do feel like I've had to work extra hard to develop my social skills. I know dozens of other homeschooled kids and I would say that the vast majority of them ended up having major social deficiencies.

I don't regret being homeschooled through elementary school as it gave me plenty of opportunity to explore areas that I was interested in, only mildly regret missing middle school since many of my friends consider it a miserable time of their lives, but I absolutely regret missing freshman year of high school.

I would very highly recommend that any parents thinking about homeschooling their kids very thoroughly consider their choices. So many of the parents I knew taught their kids at home out of fear and ended up negatively impacting their children's lives dramatically.

> They carry themselves like adults and interact with adults as a peer at 16 or even younger.

This is exactly the problem. They can relate to adults but not to their teenage peers. I'd bet they feel terribly uncomfortable at social events with only kids their age present.

You're absolutely right. I was homeschooled K-12 and grew up hearing praise because I was good at "carrying myself like an adult" and socializing with adults, but I had no idea how to make friends or socialize with PEERS. Homeschool kids don't have the opportunity to have "cringe" moments that other posters here seem to regret and feel are unimportant to kids (or should avoided altogether) because they're often admonished to act like small adults.

Which, I'm guessing, just leads to cringe moments as adults? Sounds like you've turned it around nicely though! Do you feel like you caught up eventually?

It can lead to cringe moments as an adult, but more crucially I think it leads to fear of cringe moments, so you never really get the chance to fail, look like a goober, and reorient and try again. It also makes it easier to constantly judge other people for social slip ups or for not having a perfectly predictable personality.

I think I've mostly caught up. I moved to NYC for college, which was sort of my socialization boot camp. I learned how to start and maintain relationships VERY quickly. If you don't learn to like (or at least tolerate) just about any kind of human, the city can become very lonely and difficult.

A very stubborn part of my brain still judges Very Extroverted people and, weirdly, athletes. I'm working on it.

Thanks for asking!

I'm not sure that's very important. I cringe at a lot of my behavior as a teenager, and I was very good at being social. I mean, I'm still good at being social, but I had to unlearn a lot of the behavior that made me good at being social in school.

But imagine you didn't do any of those things and therefore weren't as social in high school. Would you be as well-adjusted as an adult? Or would you have felt isolated in ways that affected your development and left you worse off in adulthood? All the teenage cringe is pretty developmentally appropriate even if it's awful in retrospect.

I don't think I agree with that. I'm a big fan of Sasse's "the Vanishing American Adult." He points out that what you call "teenage cringe" is a fairly modern construct. For most of human history, teenagers were integrated into the adult world, not set apart and left to their own devices in the modern context of "school." It's a malign symptom, not a necessary developmental stage.

Yeah, I tend to think the world would be a better place if we made more room for young people in the adult world. I think kids are capable of a lot more than we give them credit for and I think setting them apart, as you say, erodes their ability to participate in the world and makes us want to set them even further apart. If we treated them like whole people who can do things, I think they would start acting like whole people who can do things, much, much earlier.

I totally agree with you on this. Kids can take on more responsibility than they're given today - see any generation that came of age before the last 15-20 years. It would benefit many of them enormously to do so (jobs, babysitting, driving, etc). I just think it's too easy as an adult to look back on your teenage years and project your current level of social and emotional development onto your younger self or teenagers in general.

Purely anecdotal of course but the kids I met in college who were nerdy and studious and sat out that kind of social jockeying in high school were the biggest jackasses in college because they hadn't gotten any of that out of their systems yet. I kinda think we need to learn a lot of this stuff from experience - we don't learn compassion by being told to be compassionate, we learn compassion by looking back with a more mature perspective on our own actions and how they affected other people. Middle school and early high school made Mean Girls look like a documentary and while it wasn't the best time in my life I learned how to be a much better person from those experiences where I was on both the giving and the receiving end of the teenage nastiness. People are going to learn these things one way or another because we're not all born saints; in my opinion it's better to do so alongside immature peers when the stakes are lower than to do it later on as an adult.

Edit: this is in reply to ksdale, not sure why I can't reply to your comment

The need to be a "jackass", "party"... in college and high school seems uniquely American (probably a couple other 1st world countries as well). Not only have we extended adolescence nearly indefinitely, we've invented a desperate need for people to embrace self-destructive behavior to better match pre-adult societal expectations. The 20th Century did a real number on people's personal and social philosophy. It's going to take generations to shake off "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll" as the primary motivator.

All of this is to say, that just because school better aligns an individual's behavior with that of their expected peer group, it doesn't mean that's a good thing.

While I don't share your opinion on "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll," that's not really what I'm talking about here either. I'm referring to learning how to navigate complex social relationships in a low-stakes environment. It's easy to roll your eyes at high school friend or relationship drama (because it's usually stupid) but you learn a lot about how to treat other people, how not to treat other people, how to expect other people to treat you in this world etc etc. It's a crash course in the complexity of social relationships that will heavily inform how you act in adulthood, like it or not. The context goes from "Susie and Bobby kissed at the dance and I was jealous so then I kissed Bobby and now Susie won't speak to me" to "I'm jealous of Susan's relationship with Bob, but I know that hurting Susan isn't going to solve anything because the problem is my unfulfilling relationship and acting out like that will only cause me to lose a friend." Silly example but I'm tired and I hope you get the idea.

None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids (nerdy/sheltered). When I say "jackass" I'm specifically referring to the guys who were like this in high school, who were invariably the ones in college doing stupid things at parties to impress their new friends and also treating girls like crap because they were suddenly thrown into a social whirlwind they couldn't handle with any level of maturity.

> None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids

To be fair, I don’t think anyone learns much that is important by being socially sheltered like you describe. When I advocate homeschooling, that is not what I mean.

Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another. Healthy homeschooling necessarily involves intentionally finding social outlets for kids and teenagers, which is harder than letting school stand in—but, I would argue—is much easier when the adults in the family are pursuing healthy relationships and social outlets with other adults in various walks of life who are raising kids of their own (and I don’t mean at bars, dance clubs, etc.; there are still some non-kid-hostile places where adults and kids can both socialize with peers and be involved in something they enjoy, like churches, volunteering, fishing, hiking, biking, sports, etc.).

> Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another.

I think you're onto something here, especially because teenagers these days reportedly spend less time with friends than any previous generation. As a 2010 high school grad I always find these stats pretty alarming: http://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-th...

Feels like kids get home from school and immediately get online - they mainly interact with peers through social media and video games, which is totally different from being face to face. That has to be detrimental in some way. Most parents probably work so much they don't have time to have their own hobbies to share with their kids so unless the kids are on sports teams year round they're likely not doing a whole lot of IRL socializing outside of school. I think more kids are being socially sheltered these days, homeschooled or not.

Homeschool kids don't have to be isolated though, and as you say the nerdy kids at regular school are the ones that exhibit this type of behavior (which isn't bad btw, people mature at different rates). I think it's not as difficult to socialize as a homeschooler as you think it is. In fact they're often at a distinct advantage for socialization because they're usually not burdened by hours of homework so have more free time to hang out with their friends. They also can have more unstructured play time during the day if their parents choose to go that route.

Good point about homework, honestly I didn't even consider that angle. The only homeschooled kid I know is my cousin, whose parents homeschooled him because they considered him some kind of special genius (he's smart but no smarter than your average high achieving kid). He's in college now and a nice kid but just feels a bit off. They didn't homeschool either of his siblings and both of them are much better adjusted socially. Tiny sample size and definitely biased but all three grew up with the same parents, same level of extracurricular activities, etc and the only one who's not all there socially is the homeschooled one. Obviously I'm a bit biased though!

These are all great points, thank you!

I don't really mind the embarrassing things, I cringe about the times I acted like a jackass in pursuit of social approval. I was relatively well-behaved as far as it goes, but I still wasn't as compassionate as I should have been and I think I would absolutely have been better off if I had never been tempted to seek status among high schoolers.

The kids I’m referring to had and have great, healthy friendships with peers.

I’d have mentioned it if I had anticipated this response.

A family I know just decided to home school their daughter because the school didn't have adequate support for her disability. (Tourette's)

The home school group will always include more unusual cases that didn't fit the public school mold. So the entire group gets labeled, when we really should just probably avoid stereotypes for that group.

There are just too many vastly different reasons someone could be home schooled. They could be preforming at a higher level than average, or lower. Yes in general they have less access to peers their own age, but I don't know what percent of "poor social skills" is due to lack of social exposure.

I think I'd have the same question.

I have a friend who coached a club sport for high school students. They said that they saw, over their tenure, over 100 homeschooled kids come through their teams, and they can remember only a single one without significant social challenges.

There are probably a few jobs out there that do not require the ability to interact successfully with bosses and peers, but I'd imagine they are few and far between. Looking at "success" in a given job holistically, I would be inclined to argue that "soft" or social skills make up a nontrivial portion of the requisite skillset.

I guess that depends on what you mean by 'social challenges'. What are the expectations?

We participate in a homeschool community which gives weekly (if not more often) opportunities for both structured and unstructured (i.e. play) social interactions. Balance this with home-interactions between their siblings, kids in the neighborhood, and folks at our church, they interact with a pretty big array of people, and we end up getting to work with them on issues a lot more diligently and quickly.

Our group has a wide range of social skillset folks. From kids who are very hard-to-manage to visible gifted and talented people.

IMO, the "problem" only exists if you, as a parent, don't get involved in the raising of your children.

I think in terms of time, weekly is a lot different than 8 hrs a day 5 times a week (plus more on the weekends or after school).

In this comparison weekly is just the weekend piece. The cumulative time difference is dramatic.

The cumulative effect of wasting (more or less) 8 hours a day 5 times a week is also dramatic. You can work to improve the social life of a homeschooled child, improving the education of a publicly schooled child is a much bigger challenge if for no other reason than the amount of time they're "stuck" receiving a rote and mediocre (at best) education.

I was homeschooled in a similar way described above, starting community college at 16. I was relatively sheltered and never attended any sorts of sports clubs or any other activities that would involve socializing with people I didn't know. I would say it definitely had a negative impact on my social skills, as if I was learning how to socialize 5 years later than everyone else my age. Working jobs helped develop these social skills to a point, but I'm not great at making friends outside of work and I still deal with social anxiety. I believe homeschooling is a great idea, but social development should definitely be considered. Not sure about the best way to handle it though.

> never attended any sorts of sports clubs or any other activities that would involve socializing with people I didn't know

There’s a big part of the problem there. If you know ahead of time that your kids will need lots of socializing with other kids, you can mitigate the relative isolation of homeschooling pretty effectively. Sports clubs, co-op groups, church groups, etc. — all are great places for kids to make friends and socialize.

> Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved?

Is the socialization problem more due to lack of social interaction because they don't go to a school building, or more due to the kinds of people who homeschool being fringey types who wouldn't let their kids socialize with "normal" kids for fear of contamination?

Maybe I'm too "Midwestern" but my mental model of homeschooled kids is kids who were kept away from the sinful secular world by parents who really, really wanted them to grow up utterly immersed in one specific dogma, such that even the local parochial schools were too broad-minded for them. They're going to have problems integrating once they leave home, but it isn't because their parents lacked the opportunities to let them run around down at the local playground, and building more playgrounds isn't going to help them, because their parents wouldn't want them around "those" kids anyway.

That may have been the case in the past, but recently there's a trend for non-religious parents to move their kids to homeschooling to better their education and remove them from the toxic socialization that is public school (in the US at least). Many of these parents are well off professionals who can afford to support a family on a single income.

Sure. We homeschooled our kids. When we worried about socialization, we grabbed them, dragged them into the bathroom, and beat them up for their lunch money.

I'm kidding, and I stole that, but I have a point. Much of "socialization" in school is horrible. It's not quite as bad as socialization into prison, but it's socialization into a society that's rather broken. Why do we assume that socializing into that is going to produce healthy adults?

Me, I wasn't homeschooled. I attended a private school until fifth grade, and then public school. I... um... wasn't all that well socialized by the process.

I’d argue there’s a difference between socializing and being bullied - the former is just more general exposure to social interaction. I suspect the more you get of that the better, I also suspect you need it from peers too (adults are not the same).

There’s also some value in learning to stand up for friends and handle complex social dynamics which don’t go away when you become an adult.

Being removed from this entirely is probably not helpful, though obviously there are limits.

> handle complex social dynamics which don’t go away when you become an adult.

In my experience, most of the social dynamics of childhood completely disappear in adulthood. Adult generally don't spend most of their waking time with 30 or so other adults who were all born within 6 months of each other.

But most adults do spend most of their waking time with 30+ other adults (at a point in life when the differences between ages start to flatten out quite a bit). It looks quite analogous to me.

School is nothing at all like work. Not even close. Do you remember what school was like? The social dynamics are unrecognizably different.

The only place that was even remotely similar was when I worked retail during college.

I would not describe a world comprised of 20 somethings straight out of college, 30 somethings with kids, 40 somethings with teenagers, 50 somethings with college-age kids, and 60 somethings with grandkids, nor people at any of these ages without kids as possessing anywhere near the level of homogeneity as you see in a K through 12 classroom.

> I’d argue there’s a difference between socializing and being bullied

And if you could get the socialization without the bullying, that would be great. But I'm not sure there's a way to do that within the existing school structure, so your point seems to be a purely theoretical one.

> I'm kidding, and I stole that, but I have a point. Much of "socialization" in school is horrible. It's not quite as bad as socialization into prison, but it's socialization into a society that's rather broken. Why do we assume that socializing into that is going to produce healthy adults?

True. Unfortunately, a lot of the dysfunctional socialization in school actually gets carried into adulthood.

Right, children shouldn't be socializing mainly with children. That trains them to interact with children. Children grow up to be adults, who interact mainly with adults. Children need to be socializing with adults. That is what most children lack today, but is much easier to do with homeschooling.

>Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills

There's a lot of confirmation bias going on here. How many homeschooled kids with good social skills didn't you notice?

There's also a potential selection bias in that parents maybe be more likely to homeschool kids that have social issues because they have social issues and don't fit in at school.

There could be some of that, but you pretty often ask people where they went to school and how they grew up.

If there were a lot of homeschooled kids with good social skills I’d still expect to have met some.

Keep in mind that the reason people homeschool has changed a lot in the past decade. It used to be primarily religious reasons, but there's been a massive uptick of non-religious parents moving to homeschooling to better their child's education and get them out of the toxic school environment.

Unless you're quite young, it's doubtful that you've interacted with many of these next-gen homeschool kids.

>To be fair this is a pretty small sample to draw conclusions from.

I think it's pretty likely given that statement and the small population of home-schooled kids to begin with, that confirmation bias explains your entire experience.

But let's assume it doesn't. Home-schooled kids who do have good social skills are likely to realize that there is a bias against them and thus they aren't likely to advertise that they were home-schooled.

No, at least not universally. My cousins growing up were all homeschooled, and all creepy to be around. One basically never grew up despite pushing 30, another went off to college and OD'd the first week. The other two are nice people who still live at home but feel a little 'babified' to be around. Fast forward to today, just moved in next to a home-schooled family. Parents are really nice people, but their kids remind me exactly of the eldest cousin...something just 'off' when you interact with them. I hope for their own sake they grow out of it.

It isn't "solved" in the sense that there isn't a newly found method of making somebody who stays at home with siblings all day automatically more social.

But all the home-schooling communities I know of solve this problem by making sure they participate in exactly that - a community. This is more often that not tied to a church, but not always. But multiple (5+) families that all have the same approach to home schooling regularly let their kids go to each other's homes for different lessons etc. Then you add the church component and they get exposed to a broader number of families who also could be doing similar things.

You don't end up with kids that are party animals, but you do end up with kids that are very articulate, talk like adults, can read social cues, and all things considered, more well rounded human beings than the average public school attendee. Does it always work out? No, but I'd say if you have the energy and passion, you'll get a better result.

I personally don't have kids (yet) , but if I did, it would be a toss up between a good private school and home schooling.

And how are they going to be meeting life partners?

People meet partners at all sorts of places. Sure, some meet them in high school, but I don't think that's the norm. College is far more common a place to meet, and homeschoolers still go to college. Or work. Or parties. Homeschooling just replaces most of your school years, which to be honest, isn't a great time to be making decisions about choosing life partners.

> Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved?

Really? All the homeschooled kids I met at our top-ranked STEM college were way advanced technically compared to the other students and are now all married, with children, while the 'regular' kids are still dating around, no kids, no families.

Perhaps homeschooled kids don't fit in to overall American socialization, but given that overall American society is one of falling (below replacement) birth rates, increasing loneliness, more suicide, etc, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

I’ve noticed the same. One of them now runs a tech business and based on his social media presence, I can see why he’s hard to get along with.

If done the right way I think home schooling is the way to go. I would occasionally run into home schooled people when I was in the Marine Corps. They were often times a little awkward but I think that that comes mostly from their lack of recognizing authority figures.

Recognizing authorities and hierarchies are what most people mean when they talk about socializing I think.

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